Page 13 of Christmas with the Irish Devil
“That is slander,” I say, collecting my trousers just long enough to look respectable if a saint decides to visit. “I am a gentleman around copper.”
“And around pastry scrapers,” she says, rolling to her side, watching me as I leave. “Hurry back before I decide to judge you.”
The kitchen is warm with the last of the heat from her oven and smells like orange and clove and the faint toasted perfume of parmesan. I pad across tile that is clean enough to confess to, open cabinet doors the way you open a well written book, and find what I need with the luck of a man who has spent his life inventorying other people’s shelves. Cocoa powder tucked beside a bar of dark chocolate she has half shaved for a ganache, whole milk in a glass bottle with a paper cap, a jar of good honey, a pinch pot of smoked sea salt pushed back behind a tin of tea, vanilla in a small brown apothecary bottle with a handwritten label. I find a micro plane because of course there are three, and a nub of nutmeg, and I grin into the pan because I can already taste what the steam will carry back to her.
The saucepan is small and black, seasoned by use, the handle warm in my palm. I warm the milk low and slow, listening for the hush of its surface, break the chocolate with the heel of my hand, dust in cocoa to deepen the color, whisk until the first bubbles gather and dissolve. The smell lifts, heavy and soft at once. I add a stripe of honey on the back of a spoon, a drop of vanilla, a pinch of the smoked salt because she understands balance and I want her to taste the same honesty she cooked into that duck. I take one of the blood oranges from her counter, draw the micro plane across its skin once, twice, just enough to perfume the drink without turning it into a confection. The lasttouch is for me, a whisper of ground chili that sits behind the warmth and makes itself known only after the second sip.
“Declan,” she calls from the bedroom, voice sweet with suspicion. “If you are ruining chocolate, I will ruin you.”
I carry the two mugs in carefully, set them on her dresser for a moment, then lift one and offer it to her with the solemnity of a peace treaty. “I would never ruin chocolate, spitfire. I was raised better.”
She sits up against the pillows, hair a tumble, cheeks still pink, the sheet tucked loosely across her chest, and takes the mug with both hands. She inhales first, as any good cook will, and her lashes lower. “You put orange in it,” she says, pleased and accusing at once.
“I follow the theme of the evening,” I reply, claiming the other mug, settling beside her so our shoulders touch. “Taste.”
She does. Her eyes go wider, that greedy light sparking there for a moment, and then she tries to hide it by pretending to parse what I added. “Chocolate, obviously,” she says, as if she is not a witch who could name each ingredient in order. “Milk, not cream. Honey, not sugar. Vanilla, a pinch of salt, a mistake’s worth of chili.”
“Calculated mischief,” I correct.
She laughs softly around the rim. “You are infuriatingly good at everything you should not be doing.”
“It is my most endearing flaw.”
She drinks again, slower, licks a small mustache of cocoa from her upper lip without ceremony, and hums under her breath. “I do not usually drink hot cocoa after committing a public indecency,” she says. “But I will make an exception for a man who respects orange zest.”
“You are a generous woman,” I say, and tilt my mug toward hers. We clink like a promise held between porcelain.
“What did your mother teach you?” she asks after a minute, curled against me now, one knee nudging mine under the sheet, “because if Moira O’Connell taught her son to whisk like that, I want to send her a thank you card and also a strongly worded letter.”
“She taught me that rituals keep the roof on,” I answer, watching the steam ribbon up, letting the heat soak my hands. “Hot chocolate after midnight Mass when I was a boy. Dark and not too sweet, a little salt, a scrape of nutmeg if we had it. Father would tell a story about the old country, nothing soft, he did not care for sentiment, but something about saints who wandered and left candles in windows, and for the length of that mug we were allowed to be ordinary.”
Aoife’s head tilts against my shoulder. “You do know how to make a person ache in three sentences,” she says, not unkindly.
“Occupational hazard,” I tell her. “You have your own ways.”
“I bribe with butter,” she says, drowsy humor threading her voice. “And salt and vinegar. And the occasional miracle.”
“You served miracles tonight,” I say, and mean it.
She turns her face into my arm, rests there, breath warm on my skin. “That is unfair,” she murmurs. “I cannot be adorable and terrifying in the same hour.”
“You manage,” I say. “You manage very well.”
We drink in companionable quiet, the kind that arrives only after heat has burned off the edges of caution. She finishes first, sets her mug on the nightstand with a small decisive click, and tugs the hem of the sheet up to her chin like a child who has just remembered what blankets are for. I take her empty mug and mine to the dresser, come back, and find her watching me with that soft-lidded attention that feels like recognition every time she turns it on me.
“Lie down,” she says. “I want to steal your warmth without asking nicely.”
“You always ask nicely,” I tell her, lowering beside her, drawing her in until her leg is hooked over my hip and her arm is tucked between our chests. “You just disguise it as an order.”
“That is slander again,” she says, but she is already settling, one hand fisting in the sheet like she means to keep the bed from drifting out to sea. “Do you snore, O’Connell.”
“I conduct,” I say. “My breathing sets a tempo, like any good metronome.”
She snorts in a way that would embarrass a lesser woman. “If you keep being charming, I will have to pretend to dislike you on principle.”
“Pretend away,” I say into her hair, and she hums, content.
The fairy lights glow along the windowsill, a constellation small enough to pocket. Rain keeps its patient drum outside. Her weight on me is not heavy, it is anchoring, and it takes very little for my body to learn her rhythm and ease into it. She sighs once, the last of the day leaving her in a single long breath, then slips under quickly, the way people do when they have trusted themselves into exhaustion. I lie there and count her inhales, match them to the seconds ticked by the small clock on her dresser, let my own eyes close and open without falling all the way through.
